What happens after a place has been exploited, isolated, and neglected? What occurs when that place is bound – confined – by impenetrable voids of dereliction? Its core, slowing diffracting, with no opportunity to perceive outward – beyond the derelict terrain to the boundless expanses of earth and water that have perpetuated its vitality. And what then, if for a moment, this decaying place is given a view beyond these boundaries? Deindustrialization has invariably altered modern cultural conceptions of control over nature. The terrain remaining after decades of resource exploitation is composed of deep voids and fissures that reside physically, psychologically, and theoretically in-between the accepted realms of culture and nature. This thesis explores the perversion and dissolution of these two opposing realms within the sublime and fantastical derelict landscape of a declining town. Deindustrial voids are considered as both barrier and bridge; serving as persistent symbolic reminders of the volatile and hubristic relationship between culture and nature, and offering potential reconnection to the natural landscape of a city’s foundation. Reacting to collective nostalgia through memorialisation, totemism, and erasure, typical design interventions continue to prioritize cultural domination and emphasize the designer as creator in order to reassert control over the chaos of deindustrialization, often resulting in placeless infilling of the void. Ideas of extimacy, alterity, and ruination, with influences from the fields of industrial archaeology and landscape architecture, ground contemporary reactions to the deindustrial void and explore the role of landscape in the creation and fragmentation of ideas of place for the dissolving North American industrial city. Both inspired and situated within the declining former town of Fort William, Ontario, this thesis surveys an abandoned industrial corridor that encircles the town, severing it from the liminal water’s edge and landscape beyond. Viewed as a palimpsest, this site is considered beyond its most recent industrial usage to expose a place-specific natural/cultural terrain comprised of material and immaterial layers of evolution and exploitation. This thesis positions the architect as perceiver, hoping to inspire sensitivity, pause, and reflection and resists ideas of forced transformation as a means of outwardly expressing progress. It immerses itself within the in-between places that blur preconceived boundaries – natural and cultural, past and future, controlled and chaotic – in order to encounter the inherent existential qualities of a site in transition.

What happens after a place has been exploited, isolated, and neglected? What occurs when that place is bound – confined – by impenetrable voids of dereliction? Its core, slowing diffracting, with no opportunity to perceive outward – beyond the derelict terrain to the boundless expanses of earth and water that have perpetuated its vitality. And what then, if for a moment, this decaying place is given a view beyond these boundaries? Deindustrialization has invariably altered modern cultural conceptions of control over nature. The terrain remaining after decades of resource exploitation is composed of deep voids and fissures that reside physically, psychologically, and theoretically in-between the accepted realms of culture and nature. This thesis explores the perversion and dissolution of these two opposing realms within the sublime and fantastical derelict landscape of a declining town. Deindustrial voids are considered as both barrier and bridge; serving as persistent symbolic reminders of the volatile and hubristic relationship between culture and nature, and offering potential reconnection to the natural landscape of a city’s foundation. Reacting to collective nostalgia through memorialisation, totemism, and erasure, typical design interventions continue to prioritize cultural domination and emphasize the designer as creator in order to reassert control over the chaos of deindustrialization, often resulting in placeless infilling of the void. Ideas of extimacy, alterity, and ruination, with influences from the fields of industrial archaeology and landscape architecture, ground contemporary reactions to the deindustrial void and explore the role of landscape in the creation and fragmentation of ideas of place for the dissolving North American industrial city. Both inspired and situated within the declining former town of Fort William, Ontario, this thesis surveys an abandoned industrial corridor that encircles the town, severing it from the liminal water’s edge and landscape beyond. Viewed as a palimpsest, this site is considered beyond its most recent industrial usage to expose a place-specific natural/cultural terrain comprised of material and immaterial layers of evolution and exploitation. This thesis positions the architect as perceiver, hoping to inspire sensitivity, pause, and reflection and resists ideas of forced transformation as a means of outwardly expressing progress. It immerses itself within the in-between places that blur preconceived boundaries – natural and cultural, past and future, controlled and chaotic – in order to encounter the inherent existential qualities of a site in transition.

Au début du mois d'août 1757, sur les rives du lac George, dans la colonie de New York, l'armée française assiège le fort britannique William-Henry. Les Français sont accompagnés de leurs alliés amérindiens, provenant de la vallée du Saint-Laurent et de la région des Grands Lacs. Après un siège d'une semaine, la garnison britannique se rend, le 9 août 1757. Durant cette journée et la suivante, les alliés des Français vont s'en prendre aux militaires britanniques défaits. Ils pillent, ils capturent, ils scalpent, ils exhument les morts, ils se révoltent et ils se vengent. Dans la logique guerrière amérindienne, ces gestes ont un sens symbolique particulier, ils ne sont pas simplement barbares et incompréhensibles comme l'ont cru les Britanniques, les Français et les coloniaux. Les actions des alliés sont dictées par leur culture traditionnelle de même que par le processus de leur intégration dans un système militaire, économique et culturel colonial. / Québec Université Laval, Bibliothèque 2014

“The Proletarian Prometheus: Socialism, Ethnicity, and Revolution at the Lakehead, 1900-1935” is an analysis of the various socialist organizations operating at the Canadian Lakehead (comprised of the twin cities of Port Arthur and Fort William, Ontario, now the present-day City of Thunder Bay, and their vicinity) during the first 35 years of the twentieth century. It contends that the circumstances and actions of Lakehead labour, especially those related to ideology, ethnicity, and personality, worked simultaneously to empower and to fetter workers in their struggles against the shackles of capitalism. The twentieth-century Lakehead never lacked for a population of enthusiastic, energetic and talented left-wingers. Yet, throughout this period the movement never truly solidified and took hold. Socialist organizations, organizers and organs came and went, leaving behind them an enduring legacy, yet paradoxically the sum of their efforts was cumulatively less than the immense sacrifices and energies they had poured into them. Between 1900 and 1935, the region's working-class politics was shaped by the interaction of ideas drawn from the much larger North Atlantic socialist world with the particularities of Lakehead society and culture. International frameworks of analysis and activism were of necessity reshaped and revised in a local context in which ethnic divisions complicated and even undermined the class identities upon which so many radical dreams and ambitions rested. / Thesis (Ph.D, History) -- Queen's University, 2007-12-14 20:26:40.652